Hanoi has found a place on a TripAdvisor list of the world’s Top 25 destinations, together with Paris, Rome and New York.

A corner of the Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi

The list is based on traveler reviews and ratings of hotels, restaurants, attractions, and tour bookings worldwide published over a 12-month period on TripAdvisor, the world’s most popular travel guide and review website.

Hanoi is appreciated for its combination of the traditional and modern, with old streets, temples, pagodas, and other relics among modern buildings and lakes.

“The charming Vietnamese capital has aged well, preserving its old streets, monuments and colonial architecture while making room for modern developments,” TripAdvisor wrote. Hanoi may have shrugged off several former names, including Thang Long, or “Ascending Dragon”, but it hasn’t forgotten its past, it went on, as sites such as the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and Hoa Lo Prison attest. Lakes, parks, shady boulevards and more than 600 temples and pagodas add to the city’s appeal, which are all easily explored by taxi.

TripAdvisor recommends visiting the Old Quarter, which still bears the original street layout and architecture of old Hanoi. At the beginning of the 20th century the city consisted of only some 36 streets, most of which are now part of the Old Quarter. Each street at that time comprised merchants and households specializing in a particular trade, such as silk or jewelry. Street names nowadays still reflect these specializations though few of them remain exclusively in their original field of commerce.

The city’s Women’s Museum, which is dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the impact of women in Vietnamese history and culture, and the Museum of Ethnology, which features an impressive array of traditional architecture and photography exploring the country’s 54 ethnic groups, are also among visitors’ most favored places in Hanoi, according to TripAdvisor.

Hanoi is considered the cultural center of Vietnam and where every dynasty has left its imprint. It boasts more cultural sites than any other city in the country, including hundreds of pagodas and temples. Influenced by the Chinese and the French, the city features an Asian - Western style in architecture and cuisine. International arrivals to Vietnam’s capital in 2017 rose 23 per cent against 2016 to more than 4.95 million.

Other popular destinations on the list were Paris, London, Rome, Bali, Prague, Barcelona, Istanbul, New York, Phuket and Siem Reap.

VN Economic Times